Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Contrary to what Robert Green Ingersoll once said, heresy is the name given by the powerful to the doctrine of the powerful. It's what you're accused of — approvingly — when you dare to accept the conventional wisdom, while acting as though there are no professional rewards for doing so, and pretending that being handed a megaphone is roughly equivalent to being silenced.

Thus, Stewart Brand is a heretic for supporting nuclear power and seeing a positive side to slums, just like functionaries all over the planet.

Zoning in past the noise, Brand is saying heart-warming things about London and New Scientist. Then come the bombshells. Nuclear power. Now. Slums good. At the back of my mind, the word "heresy" is half-forming.

You heard it here first! This "hippy icon" from "supercool California" has dropped a "bombshell" by announcing his support for nuclear power! As he's been doing with monotonousregularityforyears, to the dutiful astonishment of the hack journalists who are routinely assigned to cover his radical pronouncements, the likes of which no one has ever heard before! Ever!

One of the most important tactics for eco-heretics — and the journalists who love them — is to grant "old-style greens" enough retroactive power and authority to make wresting it away from them emotionally satisfying. If you can find the courage, somehow, to contradict the monolithic hippie establishment that effectively ruled America from the Summer of Love until the Reagan Revolution, you're a visionary thinker in perpetuity, even if no other idea ever wanders into your head. Such are the rewards of replacing "ideology" with "ecopragmatism."

[Y]ounger generations have never heard anything optimistic about the world, says Brand of students he has lectured to. They were especially enthralled, he says, by the idea that in the future biotechnology could be used by anyone.

I feel better already.

Meanwhile, South Africa needs coal, because it must grow, because growth is good, and growth requires cheap electricity, and coal provides cheap electricity, which makes coal good, no matter what dirty fucking hippies like Stewart Brand have to say about it.

A strong body of opinion holds that multilateral development banks should be discouraged from funding coal-burning power projects with carbon dioxide emissions that contribute to climate change. We share this concern but, after careful consideration, have concluded that the course we have chosen is the only responsible way forward.

We could use a popular term for this concerned, responsible, optimistic approach to AGW. I suggest "ecopragmatism."

In unrelated news, a Japanese editorialist notes the 20th anniversary of the Sarin attack on Tokyo's subway system:

The shock spread worldwide because the chemical-weapon attack was the first time weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were used in a major city with the intent to commit mass murder.

Blowing up cities with atomic bombs don't count as "mass murder," obviously. The same goes for firebomb attacks like Operation Meetinghouse, because intentionally creating firestorms in a densely populated city isn't mass murder and incendiary bombs aren't chemical weapons and their victims aren't "victims" in any morally meaningful sense. (And of course, all of that goes double for the activities of the Japanese Imperial Army.)

To suggest otherwise would be...well, not heretical, obviously. That term is reserved for sensible people.

10 comments:

Slums are good because they provide the greatest good for the greatest number. Or at least for the number of people who actually count. Because somebody needs to live in absolute squalor and despair so the rest of us can believe they'll rise above it, or because it will ultimately do them good, or something.

Right? I mean, to let the child out of the basement in Omelas would be a disastrously cruel thing, especially since all that suffering is good for people like that! Right?

And it's double-plus good if we bury the nuclear waste in the slums! More incentive! Or cancer. But cancer's a motivator too, right?

I'm gonna go set fire to my copy of The Last Whole Earth Catalog now.....(Remembers Brand said there: "We are as gods. We might as well get good at it." Weeps at what Brand obviously meant, v. how yr. humble correspondent understood it for so many years....)

Slums are good because they provide the greatest good for the greatest number. Or at least for the number of people who actually count. Because somebody needs to live in absolute squalor and despair so the rest of us can believe they'll rise above it, or because it will ultimately do them good, or something.

IIRC, Brand feels that slums are hotbeds of productivity and innovation and efficiency. Which they are, to an extent, necessity being the mother of invention. He seems to take a basically neoliberal view in which Determination and Resourcefulness allow slum dwellers to lift themselves out of poverty. Where these overachievers go from there, I'm not sure. Maybe they become landlords.

There's something pretty bizarre about portraying the slum as an urban form that needs to be perpetuated for the common good. And if Brand's not saying that, then I'm not quite sure what he is saying.

Overall, my impression is that he's simply trying to keep himself relevant by adopting other people's "heretical" stances: Lovelock on nukes, Dyson on recreational bioengineering, Koolhaas on "self-organization" in Lagos, blah blah blah. Maybe that's unfair of me...but either way, the fact remains that the stuff he's saying is neither daring nor new.

It hardly matters, though. There's only one really important question here: "What does all this mean to the imaginary hippies who are dancing around the maypole in my head?"

IIRC, Brand feels that slums are hotbeds of productivity and innovation and efficiency. Which they are, to an extent, necessity being the mother of invention. He seems to take a basically neoliberal view in which Determination and Resourcefulness allow slum dwellers to lift themselves out of poverty. Where these overachievers go from there, I'm not sure. Maybe they become landlords.

Yeah, that's what I understand. My first thought is: get thee to a slum, then!

As I say, slums are good for the rest of us because they are such laboratories of innovation. Or something.

Interesting, NPR had a story today about a Haitian who rose from poverty to wealth by basically following Napoleon Hill's "Think and Grow Rich." Or so he said. A former Haitian government official (I has half-listening, so I may be a bit sketchy here) pointed out how much good fortune and how many obstacles this man overcame, obstacles that keep 99.9% (you get the idea) of poor Haitians poor.

By Brand's account, Haiti should be a first world country by now. Or at least teaching the rest of us how to be more efficient and innovative. That it isn't, says more about the system that keeps Brand fat, dumb, and happy, than it does about Brand's ideas about slums and "heresy."

Yeah, that's what I understand. My first thought is: get thee to a slum, then!

As I say, slums are good for the rest of us because they are such laboratories of innovation. Or something.

No argument here.

The whole thing certainly is depressing. You've got people like Hardin wanting to bash the global poor in the head with oars to keep them out of "our" lifeboat, and people like Brand wanting them to make things more reliable and comfortable for us, while we applaud their cleverness from the nosebleed seats.

Yep, it's funny how it all tends to boil down to what we get out of it.

By Brand's account, Haiti should be a first world country by now. Or at least teaching the rest of us how to be more efficient and innovative. That it isn't, says more about the system that keeps Brand fat, dumb, and happy, than it does about Brand's ideas about slums and "heresy."

Maybe they just don't want it badly enough. Some people are cursed with a dysfunctional culture, you know.